My un­der­stand­ing of #3 is that it comes from a place of in­se­cu­rity. Some­one se­cure in their own in­tel­li­gence, or at least of their own self-worth, will ei­ther ig­nore the un­known word/​phrase/​idea, ask about it, or look it up.

So from the in­side, #3 feels some­thing like: “Look, I know you’re smart, but you don’t have to rub it in, okay? I mean, just ‘cause I don’t know what ‘se­lec­tive pres­sures in tribal me­chan­ics’ are doesn’t make me stupid.”

My guess is that it feels as though the other per­son is us­ing a higher level vo­cab­u­lary on pur­pose, rather than in­ci­den­tally; kind of the like the op­po­site of the fun­da­men­tal at­tri­bu­tion er­ror. In­stead of gen­er­al­iz­ing situ­a­tion-spe­cific be­hav­ior to per­son­al­ity (i.e. “Oh, he’s not try­ing to make me feel stupid, that’s just how he talks”), peo­ple as­sume that per­son­al­ity-spe­cific be­hav­ior is situ­a­tional (i.e. “he’s talk­ing like that just to con­fuse me”).

Also, I think a lot of the re­ac­tion you’re go­ing to get out of some­one when us­ing a word or idea they don’t know is go­ing to de­pend upon your non­ver­bal sig­nals. Are you say­ing it like you as­sume that they know it? I’ve had pro­fes­sors who talk about re­ally com­plex sub­jects I didn’t fully un­der­stand as though they were ob­vi­ous, and that tended to make me feel dumb. I doubt they were do­ing it on pur­pose—to them it was ob­vi­ous—but by pay­ing a lit­tle bit more at­ten­tion to the in­fer­en­tial dis­tance be­tween the two of us, they could have mod­er­ated their tones and body lan­guage a bit to con­vey some­thing a lit­tle less dis­dain­ful, even if the dis­dain it­self was ac­ci­den­tal.

Lastly, when it comes to com­mu­ni­ca­tion I tend to fa­vor the di­rect ap­proach. If at any point I think the other per­son doesn’t un­der­stand what I’m say­ing, I try to back up and ex­plain it bet­ter. Some­times I just flat-out ask if they un­der­stood, and if not, try to ex­plain it, all while em­pha­siz­ing that it isn’t a word/​phrase/​idea that I (or any­one) would ex­pect them to know.

True or not, the above strat­egy has been effec­tive for me in re­duc­ing con­fronta­tion when the sce­nario you’re de­scribing hap­pens.

“In­stead of gen­er­al­iz­ing situ­a­tion-spe­cific be­hav­ior to per­son­al­ity (i.e. “Oh, he’s not try­ing to make me feel stupid, that’s just how he talks”), peo­ple as­sume that per­son­al­ity-spe­cific be­hav­ior is situ­a­tional (i.e. “he’s talk­ing like that just to con­fuse me”).”

Those aren’t re­ally mu­tu­ally ex­clu­sive. “Talk­ing like that just to con­fuse his listen­ers is just how he talks”. It could be an at­tri­bu­tion not of any spe­cific mal­ice, but gen­er­al­ized snooti­ness.